Nancy Chunn at Ronald Feldman
Art in America, Jan, 2005 by Edward Leffingwell
Nancy Chunn's long-standing commitment to political issues provides the visual logic that made this 22-year survey function as a line of thought. Each of the often quite large paintings takes specific focus on the violent march of history. Reminiscent of the spare, heated canvases of Leon Golub, three Neo-Expressionist oils of 1982 are dominated by predator and prey. A bat brandishing the bones of a human hand descends from the upper reaches of a 10-foot-tall canvas. A cheetah bounds into a picture, large as life, head thrown back and maw wide, roaring or yawning over a rib cage. A vulture on a vivid yellow ground teases forth an artery from the calf of a black human leg.
A number of the paintings that follow have ominously dark grounds appropriate to the seriousness of intent. Nine feet on a side, the oil-on-canvas Africa (1983), from her "Mapped Countries" series, consists of abstracted topographic rises in muted atlas colors, creased by imagined rivers. She casts the form of a modern harrow over a schoolbook continent of variously colored nations, metal talons poised to rip it from the map. Her preoccupation with the predator carries forward in Divided Countries: Germany, Korea, Ireland, Vietnam (1984). A device for breaking rocks looms menacingly above these countries.
In a series on China's ancient history, Chunn depicts a dynasty's martial and cultural milestones in blue ink figures inspired by those on classical vessels, arranged on a luminous, 19-foot expanse of oil and varnish on canvas. In a precis, she notes that the four panels of China VII: Ming Dynasty 1368-1644 (1993-95) trace the progress of empire. Here are marauding forces, ships under sail, warriors on horseback, vignettes of agrarian labor and torture, a period of commerce and plenty, the skulls and bones of the oppressed scattered along the way. In her 1996 "Front Pages" series, Chunn added commentary in the form of words and colored-ink-and-pastel images to the front pages of the New York Times.
In recent years, Chunn has produced ambitious computer-generated imagery incorporating graphic, satirical depictions of corruption and violence. She focused on fraudulent U.S. elections and political strife in Land of the Stupid (2001) and created a storyboard narrative of the disaster of 9/11 (2002-04). The 38 panels of Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear: Scene 1 (2004) take the form of an installation of images chronicling the history of perversion of the environment. Accessible and clearly organized, Chunn's tour-de-force compositions assert wit as an appropriate tool of protest, and they succeed.
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COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group
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